[happytoexplain]

I've seen this criticism a few times, specifically about the example in the article, and it's bonkers to me. What I see is somebody calling the blog post garbage, and another person saying that person was being hostile. In what possible interpretation is that a "very serious" person "shushing" somebody who "saw through the prank"? It's totally reasonable to interpret "this looks like an AI wrote it - regurgitated garbage" as primarily an insult. That it turned out to be factually true is unrelated to that.

[anigbrowl]

The comment sin question were

This is either something written by GPT-3, or the human equivalent. Zero substantive content, pure regurgitation. and

I think this was written by GPT-3.

I think you've misrepresented the tone of those comments, and saying that the correctness of their matter-of-fact opinions is unrelated to their validity is strange to me.

It's not just that these commenters said 'this blog post is no good' but that they correctly identified its artificial nature. It's like the difference between dismissing a photo or social media profile as fake and correctly pointing out that it uses an image from thispersondoesnotexist.com.

[dang]

Hold on, there's some inaccuracy here. Only one of those comments got pushback, and that comment wasn't simply matter-of-fact; the problem with it (from my point of view anyhow) was that it added a gratuitous insult ("or the human equivalent"). That made the whole thing read more like snark than straightforwardly raising a question. The other comment was more matter-of-fact about calling GPT-3 and didn't get any pushback.

The problem is that the cases legitimately overlap. That is, "sounds like GPT-3" gets used as an internet insult (example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23687199) just like "sounds like this was written by a Markov chain" used to be (example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19614166). It's not surprising that someone interpreted the first comment that way, because it contained extra markers of rudeness. That may have been a losing bet but it wasn't a bad one. Perhaps the other comment didn't get interpreted that way because it didn't throw in any extra cues of rudeness—or perhaps it was just random. Impossible to tell from a sample size of 2.

Not to take away from the glory of lukev for calling it correctly. I just don't think the reply deserves to be jumped on so harshly.

[anigbrowl]

Sure, Dan.